With all of the time that you’ve put into preparing for college applications, you want to make sure that you don’t make any major mistakes. After all, it’s not as though you worked so hard to keep your grades up and earn high SAT scores, only to get turned away from your dream colleges because you forgot to answer a question in your FAFSA. Whatever the major mistake may be, it’s probably something so basic that you never would have considered it, but just a small oversight could wreak havoc on your chances of being accepted. Here is how to avoid common college application mistakes.
Fill Out the FAFSA in Full
You wouldn’t believe how many people fail to fill out all of the questions on their FAFSA. This is either because they miss the questions, or they misunderstand the questions – or they simply don’t get it filled out in time. Filling out your FAFSA is a long process and just getting your FSA ID can take up to three days. So you want to make sure that you get started on it early and go over the entire thing twice before you hit the submit button.
Get Your Test Scores Sent Out on Time
Once you take your SAT, your SAT II and your AP tests, you want to be sure that your scores make it out to all of the schools you’re applying to. If you don’t send your requests and payments out to the college board on time, then you may be disqualified from college admissions strictly because they didn’t get your test scores. This could be devastating after all the time and money you put into taking those exams.
Spend Plenty of Time with Your Essay
You definitely don’t want to rush through your essay the way that you may have done with high school essays in the past. Your college admissions essay should be your greatest piece of written work to date, and it definitely shouldn’t have any major typos or grammatical errors. Not only do you want to make sure that you are approaching the content of your essay in a very smart way, but you also want to make sure that you have it proofread by a few trusted people before you submit it with your application.
Proofread Your Application
In addition to proofreading your essay, you want to make sure that you proofread everything on your college admissions applications. There shouldn’t be any spelling or grammatical errors, your sentences shouldn’t be fragmented or passive, you shouldn’t go on any tangents, and you want to be sure that you are answering each question in full. You also want to be sure that you’ve filled in all of the boxes correctly. A mistake in your birthdate, your nationality, or your intended major could have a very negative impact on your chances of being accepted. If you’re applying for GW’s political science degree and you accidentally select physical science, your whole application could be very confusing.